Blog Archives: 2014

Today we’re sharing the first in a series of research case studies examining the impact of ABCmouse.com in school and home environments. This case study focuses on the experience of Julie Choudhary, a 25-year-veteran kindergarten teacher in Escondido, California, and her use of ABCmouse.com to differentiate instruction and engage families. Julie found that ABCmouse.com helped her students make significant academic gains, with growth on key early literacy skills of more than twice the national average.

Today Age of Learning is attending the White House Summit on Early Education to support the launch of Invest in US, a national campaign to ensure that all children and communities have access to high-quality early childhood education.

As a participant in Invest in US, Age of Learning is making a commitment to provide free access to the complete, award-winning ABCmouse.com curriculum in every U.S. preschool, Head Start, pre-k, and kindergarten classroom over the next two years.

“Age of Learning is proud to support this vitally important White House initiative to expand access to high-quality and effective early childhood education resources,” said founder and CEO Doug Dohring. “This initiative aligns with our goal to advance educational equity and help all children learn.”

Age of Learning is proud to announce that the ABCmouse.com Early Learning Academy app is now available for iOS and Android, with access to our complete award-winning curriculum on tablets and smartphones!

ABCmouse.com is the leading and most comprehensive online learning resource for children ages 2 through 6+, with more than 5,000 carefully designed learning activities encompassing reading and language arts, math, science, social studies, art, and music.

There’s big news in a recent poll released by the First Five Years Fund: People throughout the country now broadly support strengthening early childhood education.

Indeed, 85% of those polled say that ensuring that children get a strong start in life is one of the nation’s top priorities.

We’re pleased to see this issue is now getting the attention it deserves, as the early years are so critical to a child’s development and prospects for success in school and in life.

Over the past few years, states as diverse as Oklahoma, Georgia, Illinois, Florida, West Virginia, and Maine have adopted statewide preschool or pre-kindergarten programs, and several others are working toward that goal.

Age of Learning was pleased to participate in the Families In Schools Passport to Success Day this past Saturday in downtown Los Angeles. The event featured California State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson, who spoke about the important work that Families In Schools is doing.

Families In Schools (FIS) is the leading organization working in Los Angeles and beyond to strengthen family engagement as a critical component of school reform and improved student outcomes. FIS’s mission is to involve parents and communities in their children’s education, recognizing that students are more likely to succeed when schools, families, and communities partner to support student learning. In its first 10 years, FIS has helped over 140,000 families through school and community partnership programs.

A growing body of research suggests that reading proficiency by third grade is one of the most powerful predictors of future academic and even career success. According to the Campaign for Grade-Level Reading (CGLR), “74% of students who fail to read proficiently by the end of third grade falter in later grades and often drop out before earning a high school diploma.”

Unfortunately, however, about two-thirds of third-grade children in the U.S. fall short of that reading proficiency goal.

For these reasons, Age of Learning is a proud supporter of the Campaign for Grade-Level Reading, a collaborative, nationwide effort to ensure that more children in low-income families succeed in school and graduate prepared for college, a career, and active citizenship.

This past weekend at the 2014 American Library Association Annual Conference, Age of Learning, Inc. launched ABCmouse.com® for Libraries™, a fully featured, free-for-libraries version of ABCmouse.com Early Learning Academy, our award-winning online curriculum used by millions of children.

ABCmouse.com for Libraries gives children free access through all of the 16,000 U.S. public libraries to the leading and most comprehensive online learning resource for children ages 2 through 6+. Since the American Library Association reports that there are more than 300 million sessions annually on Internet-connected computers at U.S. public libraries, this initiative will significantly increase families’ ability to access and use this valuable curriculum resource.

For our first post on the Age of Learning blog, we decided to start at the beginning, interviewing two members of our Curriculum Board who have been central to shaping ABCmouse.com since before the site launched and who continue to guide our growing early learning curriculum: Kim Oliver Burnim (2006 National Teacher of the Year) and Dr. Rebecca Palacios (2014 National Teachers Hall of Fame inductee and founding member of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards).

We spoke to them recently about their collective five decades of classroom experience and their passion for excellence in early childhood education.